The Republican debaters spent a good deal of time Thursday night talking about ISIS—or rather spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about the extremist organization of Muslim-murdering jihadists that even al Qaeda has accused of going too far.
We learned from each of them, in the case of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, more than once, that, as president, they would protect America from attacks by ISIS better than any of the other GOP candidates, and certainly better than President Obama has done. Rubio, in particular, said he would root out ISIS in the United States. In fact, their prescriptions simply repeated what is already being done and expressed conventional wisdom about what more needs to be done.
Rubio would ship any ISIS jihadis found in the U.S. or abroad to that obscenity at Guantánamo Bay. Chris Christie, who just couldn’t avoid mentioning 9/11, said that as a prosecutor and governor who gets things done, he would put together a coalition of Sunni Muslims and Europeans to take out ISIS wherever it is found. He would embed U.S. troops with the Iraqi military. Oh, and by the way, he would ”get the lawyers off the damn backs of the military once and for all,” meaning, presumably, that John Yoo would return from his teaching post at Berkeley to write tendentious memos explaining why torture is okay. Jeb Bush repeated his previous advice for building a coalition to carry out an air and ground campaign.
Overall, the candidates’ responses amounted mostly to a bombastic dick-waving contest, the John Wayne approach to foreign policy, containing nothing that we haven’t heard from them previously on the subject.
And all of it couched in the standard GOP “rebuilding the military” framework, with jabs at Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and, of course, Barack Obama, for having supposedly weakened the nation and endangered Americans by reducing the gargantuan amount of money the U.S. lays out for its arsenal and troops. Saint Reagan was invoked for the military build-up that supposedly bankrupted the Soviet Union, a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.
It’s hard to tell which candidate was worst. But Ted Cruz certainly was near the front of the pack. His response regarding “carpet bombing” was particularly telling since he continues to define the term in a way nobody else does even though he’s been called out on the matter previously when he talked about carpet bombing ISIS “into oblivion” to see “if sand can glow.” Thursday, in reiterating his advocacy of that approach, he said he would "apologize to nobody" about it, claiming that the U.S. carpet-bombed Iraqi forces during the first Gulf War. No, it didn’t.
Cruz’s take in the matter, like so much else in his repertoire, is a pile of manure. Whatever criticisms can be made about the tactics and strategy being deployed to defeat ISIS, arguing in favor of World War II and Vietnam-style bombing is pure nonsense, a guarantee that vastly more civilians will be killed than is now the case. He might as well open a recruiting office for ISIS.
The last thing America needs is more of the blinkered, chest-thumping, gunslinging foreign policy that took us into Iraq and contributed so much to creating ISIS in the first place.